Part 2: As we walked, the most persuasive man alive made me feel the full weight of this decision. Pixar had landed a deal with Disney to make a full-length movie. We had a design for a dual-processor computer that would solve our speed problems.

Despite our heated battles, I had grown fond of Steve. He gushed when he talked about his sister Mona, whom he hadn’t met until he was 27. It seemed like he was on the verge of crying as he talked about how she had become one of his very best friends. I thought he might burst into tears when he sat cross-legged on my office floor the morning his trusted VP of Engineering, Bud Tribble, left for our dreaded enemy Sun. They wrote a press release about Bud to rub salt in our wounds.

When I told Steve that General Magic’s vision was so compelling that I had to be part of it, he told me how he admired the team. Four of them were core to the original Macintosh: Bill Atkinson, Andy Hertzfeld, Joanna Hoffman and Susan Kare. It was true; he stayed in touch with all four until his death.

Two years after that walk, he would visit General Magic to play with our touch-screen device that had no physical keyboard.